SOURCE: "Poets with History and Poets without History," in Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated with Introduction and Notes by Angela Livingstone, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 136-48.

The following is an excerpt from an article that was originally published in a Serbian journal in 1934. Here, Tsvetaeva differentiates the genius of lyric poets from that of other poets. Lyric poets, she argues, do not, like other poets, seek to gain new experience and self-discovery through their work, but rather they delve again and again into the same experiences in hopes of expressing them more eloquently.

… What is the 'I' of a poet? It is—to all appearances—the human 'I' expressed in poetic speech. But only to appearances, for often poems give us something that had been hidden, obscured, even quite stifled, something the person hadn't known was in...